The Financial Market Infrastructure Act Will Make It Harder for Swiss Banking Clients to Hide behing the Secrecy

The Financial Market Infrastructure Act Will Make It Harder for Swiss Banking Clients to Hide behing the Secrecy

The Financial Market Infrastructure Act will probably be debated and voted on by the parliament in March 2015. The bill set to make it harder for suspected tax cheats and others to hide behind secrecy rules. It will waive the requirement for the Swiss finance regulator, FINMA, to pre-inform bank clients that data on them has been shared with a foreign regulator if doing that could compromise the outcome of the investigation.

‘The Swiss Bankers’ Association doesn’t oppose the bill provided it is applied where there is a risk a legitimate request for help might be otherwise torpedoed, and the FINMA justifies each case where a client is not informed’, said Sindy Schmiegel, a spokeswoman for the lobby, to Bloomberg.

The FINMA, which received nearly 500 requests for assistance from foreign investigators in 2013 — triple the number in 2009 — is not comfortable with the status quo reports Bloomberg. Today’s clause to pre-inform clients gives them an opportunity to avoid being detected and poses a dilemma from the regulator point of view.